WHAT IS THEIR SECRET?
Degenerates Surround
A Nero-Like President
by Tony Papert
April 16—Lyndon LaRouche dropped the following bombshell in his international webcast of April 11. Since then, proof has come to light that the "behavioral economists" whom LaRouche was indicting, are witting or unwitting carriers of the virus of British fascism, as LaRouche outlined below.
According to the Time [magazine, April 13] account, confirmed by sources close to the Obama White House, the President has been surrounded by a collection of 'behaviorist economists,' who have cultivated a cult-like following through the publication of such daffy economic tracts as Freakonomics, Nudge, Predictable Irrationality, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Animal Spirits. These economists, including longtime Obama advisors Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Kahneman, have formed a tight clique, surrounding the President, to the exclusion of some of the more well-known and relatively competent economists, originally brought in to the Obama White House, but who have now been cast aside, in favor of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian kooks....
Unfortunately, the entire inner circle of White House economic advisors, from Larry Summers, to OMB director Peter Orszag, are full-fledged proponents of this insane doctrine of animal behaviorism," LaRouche continued. "Indeed, one of the 'founders' and leading figures within the 'behavioral economics' camp today is Harvard economist, Larry Summers crony, and arch hedge fund swindler Andrei Shleifer, the man whose double dealings in Russia in the 1990s led to criminal investigations and, ultimately, to the ouster of Larry Summers as President of Harvard. Shleifer's swindle, and Summers' coverup of the scam cost Harvard University more than $40 million in legal fees and fines. When Summers moved, as President of Harvard, to protect his protege Shleifer, and prevent his ouster, things turned against Summers, and, in 2006, the entire scandal blew up, leading to Summers' ouster and a plethora of media exposes.
Time revealed an even larger circle of White House economic gurus, who are all proponents of the Benthamite theories of bestial man. 'Orszag has been an unabashed behavioral geek.... His deputy, Jeff Liebman of Harvard, is a noted behavioral economist, as are White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, Assistant Treasury Secretary nominee Alan Krueger of Princeton, and several other key aides. Sunstein has been nominated to be Obama's regulatory czar. Even National Economic Council director Larry Summers has done work on behavioral finance. And Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainthan is organizing an outside network of behavioral experts to provide the Administration with policy ideas,' Time reported.
The movement's founder was Daniel Kahneman, a French Jew born in 1934, whose family fled to Palestine during the war. In Israel, he received his B.A. in psychology, and then, worked as a psychologist in the Israeli army, picking up fellow-Israeli, Amos Tversky, as a research partner. Kahneman wrote that he was inspired by brainwasher-psychologist Kurt Lewin's concept of the "psychological field," which motivates people from outside. But this is not yet precisely to the point of the main issue.
Although Kahneman and Tversky were often met with scorn and ridicule, they published paper after paper over the decades, beginning in 1969. On the surface level, every successive paper made the same point, even though Kahneman always denied it was their point, namely: that people are irrational. Through questionnaire after questionnaire, the pair would prove that people's "choices" were regularly irrational, as Kahneman and Tversky define reason. Hence the book of their follower, Daniel Ariely of MIT, Predictably Irrational. Note, by the way, that this Ariely, another Israeli emigré, has made himself a "pain and pleasure suit, to measure how we combine pain (caused by extreme hot or cold temperature) in one part of our body, and pleasure in another...."
But this irrationality is not yet the real story either. What is really going on? Here is one of Kahneman's questionnaires: You must deal with a public health epidemic threatening 600 people. First question: One course of action would save 200. The other has a one-third chance of saving 600, and a two-thirds chance of saving none. Which would you choose? Second question: One course of action action will result in 400 deaths; the other has a two-thirds chance of 600 deaths and a one-third chance of no deaths. Which would you choose?
Sophist's Choice
Now it's obvious: the real point is not the trivial nonsense of comparing probabilities, as Kahneman pretends. The real objective is the dehumanization, rather bestialization, involved in submitting to such questions at all. This is the theme of the movie "Sophie's Choice," about a Polish mother forced by a sadistic SS officer to chose which of her children she will sacrifice to him. This, from Kahneman, who fled from the Holocaust; there is probably more to be learned about that story.
And speaking of bestial questions: Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein wrote a paper on "The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making." Male college students were asked questions about sex-related subjects, and their answers were compared before masturbation, and then while they were masturbating.
Turn to fellow-cultist Cass Sunstein, a longtime Obama friend, now a prospective White House nominee, who is married to National Security Council official Samantha Power. Sunstein is an animal-rights cultist as well. He quotes Kant, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, declaring that animals have human-like rights. Animals should be able to bring suit in court, through human lawyers, against violations of these rights. He wrote, "I believe that in the long run, our willingness to subject animals to unjust suffering will be seen as a form of unconscionable barbarity, not the same as, but in many ways morally akin to slavery and mass extermination of human beings." Lyndon LaRouche responded: he means go for slavery and mass extermination, since we're already doing the equivalent to animals. Animal rights? Picture lines of pigs wearing swastika brossards on their arms.
This is the bestiality, the degeneracy, of the "Hell-Fire Club" circles of Bentham and Shelburne, as Sunstein himself advertises that connection. The Nero-President has surrounded himself with a horde of degenerates, as the original Nero did. Nero began this involuntarily in boyhood, but then, later, continued it deliberately, as he turned against and killed every advisor and associate with a shred of morality, replacing them with degenerates, generally freedmen and often eunuchs, including newly minted ones.
But where do they all get their orders? From Obama? No! To continue the story of Kahneman and Tversky: they labored on amidst much ridicule until 1982-86, when the two big foundations, Russell Sage and Alfred P. Sloan, decided to begin spending millions to meld the group of Israeli psychologists with largely American economists. The foundation money swept everything before it. Kahneman and Tversky eventually shared a Nobel prize in economics.
Time reported that a stream of frequent written orders or recommendations has long been flowing into the Obama campaign, and later the Obama Presidency, from "the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists." Not exactly. The group of 29 is actually called the Behavioral Economics Roundtable, based in the Russell Sage Foundation in Washington, D.C. It is a self-selecting, self-perpetuating group, just like Cecil Rhodes' Round Table which governed the British Empire for the Fabian Society. Most of those named in this report are members.
But what is the Russell Sage Foundation? As we have documented since 1976, it has been an arm of the British Fabian Society ever since its foundation in 1907. What is the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation? Mussolini-lover Sloan was chosen as CEO of General Motors in 1923 by the pro-fascists of the J.P. Morgan bank and of DuPont. He founded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1934, the same year that he founded the American Liberty League with John J. Raskob. The Liberty League tried to get rid of Roosevelt, while their propaganda favored Mussolini and Hitler. The Alfred P. Sloan foundation represents the London-allied, Hitler- and Mussolini-loving titans of Wall Street.
If the Blond Lead the Blond
What first came to light on April 14, just days after LaRouche's webcast, was that Chicago's Richard Thaler and the rest of the gang of "behavioral economists" who have seized control over President Obama, are simultaneously in the middle of a scheme by the British Fabian Society, to transform Britain's opposition Conservative (Tory) Party into a fascist party, in preparation for the Tories' expected rise to power, at some time over the coming months.
On April 8, Tory shadow Chancellor (Treasury Secretary nominee) George Osborne, suddenly "bore witness," at embarrassing length, to the genius of behavioral economist-kooks Richard Thaler, Robert Cialdini, Dan Ariely, and others, who have been travelling to London to advise the Tories. Osborne described the behaviorists' so-called experiments, and pledged himself to various pathetic "behavioral economics" schemes to improve personal behavior, for instance, by encouraging recycling of garbage and by discouraging impulse buying. Whatever any of this might have to do with reversing a world economic-breakdown crisis, one can only imagine, but Osborne's incongruous tone was that of the Damascus Road convert.
Converted to what? Indeed, all the "behavioral economists' " public utterances are so irrelevant, trivial, and boring that they can only be considered a sort of "wink and a nod" among the knowing, or a Masonic handshake. Their only actual content is their sheer bestiality. Imagine a Masonic handshake which includes a deliberate, painful wounding; but the junior initiate pretends not to feel anything.
On April 14, Osborne's odd confession of faith was hailed by a certain Phillip Blond in an op-ed in the London Financial Times. Blond said that the Tories had earlier driven a "social revolution" in Britain since 2006, but the fear has been that their plans for "civic renewal" would not be integrated with the party's economic policy. But now, at last, Osborne's conversion to behaviorist economics has solved that problem, and "marks the beginning of a genuinely conservative rather than neo-liberal approach to political economy....
"The arid centralism of Mr. [Gordon] Brown—and, for that matter, Barack Obama, US president—seems committed to nothing more than a bail-out of monopolised markets by a newly enthroned monopoly state," Blond wrote. But on other hand, "if carried through, the new logic of British Conservatism requires a break-up of this cosy corporatist duopoly and its replacement by a decentralised civic economy that crafts together moral values and economic power to create the type of society that most people want to live in: empowered, secure and sustainable communities of shared virtue and prosperity."
Who is this Blond, or "Blond on Blond," as some call him in Britain? Until January of this year, he was a lecturer on religion in various British universities. Then he was hired by the secretive Demos think-tank, an arm of the British Fabian Socity, to head something it called its Progressive Conservative Project, a.k.a. "Red Toryism." The purpose was to reprogram or brainwash the Tory Party, just as, in the first years of this century, it was Demos which similarly pasted together the belief-structure of Tony Blair's New Labour. Now the Fabian Society's New Statesman magazine describes Blond as "the Conservatives' philosopher-king."
What is the future to which Blond and the Fabians would bring us through the brainwashed Tories? It is a return to the bliss of the Dark Ages, before it was destroyed by the Renaissance and the modern nation-state, represented by "secular monarchs. From the 14th Century on, they asserted their power and corrupted a pre-existing highly plural and reciprocal community with demands for top-down allegiance, authority and control," Blond wrote in a widely published September 2008 article, "Medieval Thinking, "Updating and recovering this earlier medieval model for the modern age is of course the task." Of course.
We will all become property-owners, Blond promises, as joint owners of community investment trusts, which will create local cooperatives and "indeed guilds, around which people can invest." Britain should hand its local post offices over to these local trusts, Blond writes. It seems the nation-state will melt away, as for Karl Marx. Will the local witch-doctor replace the National Health Service? Blond never quite gets to the answer.
All this medieval mummery is part of the ideology of especially Mussolini's Fascist movement, as is well-known to the historically literate. But it doesn't come from Mussolini. Blond openly declares that his models are John Ruskin and the British "Catholic" fascists G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc,—for which, indeed, Blond has been sharply criticized by some in Britain. The so-called Catholics, Chesterton and Belloc, were indeed Mussolini supporters and fervent anti-Semites. But they were not imitators of Mussolini, as Lyndon LaRouche has pointed out. Rather, Mussolini's British sponsors fashioned him in imitation of the British Fabian-Society authors of fascism, such as Chesterton and Belloc. And Phillip Blond.
Blond's quest to return to the Middle Ages immediately reminds one of such H.G. Wells fictions as "The Shape of Things to Come," and "The Time Machine." British intelligence leader Wells was the mother lode for Britain's Orwellian fascist tradition, just as the Wells Society spreads British fascism in the United States.
And what does all this say for President Obama, the captive of the same Fabian-deployed "behavioral economists" who have captured the leading British Tories and are reprogramming them into fascists? It is a warning at five minutes to midnight!
—Anton Chaitkin, Mark Bender, and Nina Ogden contributed research to this article.
